Sonia Mehra Chawla is the recipient of the coveted Charles Wallace India Trust Award for Visual arts 2014-15. Charles Wallace India Trust supports excellence in the field of visual art through research and innovative practice. CWIT enables Indians in the early to mid stages of their careers to spend time in the UK, helping them to achieve artistic, academic and professional ambitions and to broaden their international contacts. British Council India and British High Commission India advise on CWIT's work and gives valuable administrative support.

Charles Wallace India Trust and British Council India will support Chawla's research project and professional visit to London Print Studio in UK.

Sonia Mehra Chawla works in multiple mediums and her practice incorporates and amalgamates photography, printmaking, painting, and video. Her artistic practice is concerned with the construction of nature that is defined not just as the physical world around us but also, and especially, the conditions of our physical, metaphorical, social and ecological interactions with it. The artist develops new tools and strategies through her practice that unsettle conventional wisdom about our relationship with and within nature.

During the course of her visit to the UK, the artist will explore innovative techniques in Photopolymer Gravure or Solar Etching using steel backed Toyobo plates to create her meticulous imagery. Although photopolymers have been used extensively in industrial processes, their use in fine art processes is fairly recent and a breakthrough in non toxic intaglio printmaking.

ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

LONDON PRINT STUDIO, UK

Sonia Mehra Chawla is the International artist-in-residence at the London Print Studio United Kingdom for 2014-15 along with acclaimed International artists Tomoko Watanabe, Robert Walsh, Agatha Ciesielska and Berry Klingman. Chawla will collaborate with the studio's chief coordinator and technical adviser Katherine Van Uytrecht, along with some of the studios finest technicians to execute her work over the next year.

London Print Studio is an artist run non-for-profit artists' studio, workspace, publisher and contemporary art gallery based in West London that is exclusively dedicated to innovative fine art printmaking. Creative collaboration is at the heart of the studio's practice. London Print Studio has collaborated with and produced exclusive editions for several established and emerging artists across the globe including Lucien Freud, Gary Hume, Fiona Banner, Therese Oulton, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Terry Frost, Maggie Hambling, Adrian Wiszniewski and The Sex Pistols.